More North Thailand; Khon Kaen

After a short stay in Nong Khai on my way south from Laos, Khon Kaen enabled me to do the jobs for which I needed those little conveniences like reliable power supply and phone lines that Laos lacks. Internet is very cheap here; 15 baht per hour at any one of at least a dozen places around town. I also found an excellent photo shop on Thanon Klang Meuang near the intersection with Thanon Srichan that did a very good job on the seven rolls of film I’d accumulated over the last few weeks. I also wanted to get a second Lao visa at the consulate here.

Khan Kaen is very clean and easy to get around with a simple transport system but is very busy with traffic all day. It doesn’t have any major tourist attractions however but there are a few things in and around town and the market area is very interesting.

Quick Tips:

The tourist office on Thanon Prachasamosorn I found to be absolutely useless. None of the staff spoke any English at all and there were no maps or written information in anything but Thai. Next door, the tourist police seemed to have grabbed all the English tourist literature. I visited this office twice. The first time it was full of officers who spoke excellent English and gave me good information. The second time there was just one non-English-speaking officer on duty, so the information I wanted had to be got via phrasebook and not very successfully at that!

Best Way To Get Around:

On the back of the Khon Kaen city map provided by the tourist police, is a very easy-to-read set of three route maps for the numbered pick-ups that serve Khon Kaen. Buses to/from Udon Thani take two hours for 50B ordinary bus and to Phu Kradung for the national park, buses leave every half an hour and take about three hours for 49B.

Khon Kaen really does have the grottiest budget hotels I’ve seen in my five months in Thailand! After looking at two very tatty hotels and one nice (a little dear for me), I’d almost ran out of budget options in my guidebook when I saw a simple sign "guesthouse 100B per day" pointing down a narrow alley opposite the Roma Hotel on Thanon Klang Meaung. This led to a cluttered courtyard in which there was a long, single-storey building divided into six rooms. The room I looked at was huge with a double bed, fan, two wardrobes, a cabinet, shelves, and a WC. Although the shower was bucket-style, this represented a bargain for 100B a day. One problem; it was already occupied! Well, it was until Madela moved out all the clothes belonging to the now previous tenant! It turned out that all the rooms are occupied by Thai families or friends of Madela’s on the understanding that they make room for any paying guests that show up. The young girl I displaced bunked in with her friend three doors down! Madela was a very nice lady despite our Thai/English communication problems.

On my second day, I returned to my room to find it cleaned, the bedsheets changed and six bottles of water left for me. Two days later, I again came back to this and any clothes left laying around had been washed as well! When I needed petrol for my camping stove, Madela leapt onto her motorbike to get it for me, and there was a constant supply of tea bought to me in a good old-fashioned tea-pot!

While certainly not your run-of-the-mill guesthouse, this was one of the friendliest and most comfortable I’ve stayed at in a long time.

This museum is really the only tourist attraction in town and a minor one at that! A 1km walk or a no.12, 17, or 21 pick-up ride from the city centre, it’s really only of interest to archaeological types or those who are into Buddhist statuary! Quite a few religious artifacts have been unearthed in the area (mainly 11th-14th century) and are on display here. The accompanying information is in English except in one of the two ethnology rooms where it’s all only in Thai! There are collections of ancient marker stones in the grounds outside the museum, some with interesting carvings and inscriptions.

It costs 30B to get in and the museum is open from 9am to 4pm Wednesday through Sunday. It helps to while away an hour or so, but it’s certainly not worth stopping in Khon Kaen for!

A short excursion from Khon Kaen is Kok Sa-Nga village where King Cobras are bred. A green no.501 "Kranuan" bus goes every hour from the bus station and drops you off at the village turn-off for 20B (the trip takes about one-and-a-half hours). It’s a 2km walk or motorbike taxi ride from there.

I wasn’t sure what to expect after reading the leaflet given to me at the tourist police office. From the leaflet, it looked like a bit of a circus show inviting tourists to watch the handlers kiss the snakes, dance with them, and even put the snakes’ heads in their mouths! In fact, there are two of these ‘circuses’ in the village: the Kok Sa-Nga Zoo Society and the King Cobra Club Of Thailand. The Zoo Society I walked past looked like just a ramshackle collection of wooden huts around a small stage with big speakers. The King Cobra Club was actually pretty much the same on a bigger scale. Rows and rows of chairs were laid out by the stage, clearly in anticipation of bus tours. The cobras themselves were housed in large cages, as were a couple of pythons, crocodiles, and lizards. If you want to see a performance, you have to wait for a group to show up and then contribute a 'donation.' I wasn’t too keen on seeing what the photographs around the place confirmed as a circus show, so I left.

I think the quiet walk through very rural Kok Sa-Nga to and from the main road was a lot more enjoyable than the Cobra Club. It really begs to be said, but it was, in my opinion, a load of old cobras!

Not really a tourist attraction, but these markets are both huge and very, very interesting and colourful. In the early morning, the day market kicks into life with the arrival of trucks loaded with fruit and vegetables. The day market is centred around an area bound by Klang Meuang, Srichan, Cheetakhan, and Namuang roads, but it’s on the surrounding streets and alleys that the real colours and smells are found. Ladies sitting with piles and pyramids carefully stacked with every sort of fruit and vegetable imaginable - then some not so imaginable! There were bowls of frogs, turtles, and cockroaches; saucers of grubs; and bunches of herbs and greens picked from the roadside that just look like weeds to me! Needless to say, the market is humming with activity in the mornings. It’s as much a social meeting place as a market.

A few streets further north, the night market is found. At around 5pm stalls start to appear on Klang Meuang Road north of the post office and Ruenrom Road is completely taken over by rows and rows of stalls, tables and chairs - so many, there’s barely space to walk! You name it, you can have it barbecued, baked, fried, boiled, or even raw! You can get your food served in a plastic bag to take away, too. It’s a great place to wander around even if you don’t eat here.

Designated in 1991 as Thailand’s 72nd National Park, Phu Pha Maan is a 2-hour bus ride from Khon Kaen or 1.5 hours from Loei on bus route #217.

From the park entrance on route 201, it’s 5km to the park headquarters and visitor centre. I got a lift on a park ranger’s motorbike to save me the hot walk. The visitor centre and park headquarters are located on very well-tended, landscaped grounds, and the communal toilets by the campground are spotlessly clean. One reason for this is that Phu Pha Maan is very rarely visited, being sandwiched between two big, well-known parks: Phu Kradung and Nam Nao. After pitching my tent, I took a walk along the nature trail that took me through mostly bamboo forest. The track is not well-maintained, and a lot of tree-fall and overgrowth made the way very hard to find sometimes, but the reward for persistence is a scramble up the rocky mountain to a lovely view point over the park. From here, I could see that a lot of the park is actually cultivated land. The park is protecting the limestone and granite cliffs that rise up from this flat area and the woodland on the lower slopes that merge with Phu Kradung National Park further north.

The major point of interest here is the many caves in these sheer cliffs, so on my second day, I started out early to walk the 8km to see some of these. The walk was mostly through grassland and sweetcorn fields that turned to forest as I got nearer to the cliffs. There are many butterflies along the way and a few birds to spot if you have patience and binoculars. The showpieces of Lai Thong Cave are the ancient cave paintings. The simple figures are of humans painted in red above the main cave entrance while inside is a beautiful collection of stalagmites and stalagtites.

A better selection can be seen a further 1.5km scramble at Pa Ya Nakarach cave. A very narrow entrance leads into a veritable auditorium. The glitter stalagmites I expected were conspicuous in their absence. Possibly, I didn’t walk far enough inside. Having negotiated some small wooden ladders to get to the cave floor, I walked a little way in with my cheap Chinese torch until my childhood fear of the dark overtook me and I went back the way I came! Apparently, there are a number of large chambers deeper inside, maybe with glitter!

It’s quite a hot hike there and back, but I picked up a friend. A dog appeared from a farmer’s yard near the caves and DIDN’T bark at me! It led me up to the caves, followed me the 8km back to park headquarters, and then faithfully followed me everywhere I went - even sleeping outside my tent for the night! Apart from the 200B entry fee, I wasn’t charged anything for camping, but there is nowhere to eat at the park.

Possibly the main reason tourists stop in Khon Kaen is to pick up visas for their onward journey. The Lao consulate has recently moved to a new building on Thanon Prachasomosorn. It’s about 3km from the city centre on pick-up routes 10 and 11. It has to be one of the most efficient consulates or embassies I’ve ever been to! My visa was issued in 15 minutes! As a UK passport holder, it cost 1,350B for a 30-day visa and the staff were very informal, friendly and spoke English very well.

Not only that, but today (Xmas Day!) when I returned to Khon Kaen, struggling to see all the things I want in this part of Thailand before having to cross into Laos as my Laos visa expires, I went back to try and get the validity date extended a bit. They gave me an extra month to use the visa I paid for two months ago! NO consulate ever does that!

The Vietnamese consulate is at 65 Thanon Chatapadung (pick-up route 10), and though the staff were friendly, no one spoke any English despite the English language newspaper, the Bangkok Post, sitting on the official’s desk! With the aid of my Thai phrasebook, I found that a 30-day visa would cost me US$40 and take three days to issue. I was hoping it would be easier and cheaper than getting it in Bangkok, but that isn’t the case, so I’ll have to brave that horrible place once more!